I will be doing book signing from 10-10:30 Friday at the conference bookstore. I mean, I am willing to sign a book at ay time, but I will actually be sitting down, not distracted, and have a pen in my hands that specific half hour.
Come say hi!
I’ve lost track of how many ACS conferences I have attended. I pretty sure I have attended every one not on the East Coast since 1999. Almost universally, they have been awesome experiences that have taught me innumerable things about cheese and introduced me to people I otherwise might never have met.
Back when I first started going, there were only about 300 people attending the conferences but still, I didn’t know anyone except for a handful of California cheesemakers. While I am sometimes good about faking it, I am actually kind of shy by nature, so I am humbly going to attempt to produce a guide that I would have found useful back in the day.
I’m sure this advice will be weighted to the independent urban retailer, but hopefully others will find it helpful as well. I have never had obligatory parties to attend* or – except when the conference was in Cotati and San Francisco – co-workers to divide the day with so I’ve always had to figure out how to get the most of the events on my own. I’m sure I can’t come up with everything so, Cheese Folks, feel free to add suggestions in the comments.
Social Tips:
1. Say Hi and Introduce Yourself.
I know this is basic, but this is what the conference is for. Talk to strangers. ACS has really made this easier with both the “Meet the Cheesemaker” and “New Attendees” events. Even meeting a cheesemaker for a few minutes means that they may remember you if you call for advice or to warn them that there is something odd about a wheel you just received. Plus. This is a small world. You may see them at an event 6 months down the line where you are the only cheese people in a crowd of wine snobs and food bloggers and you will need each other for support. I have started lifelong friendships by things like striking up a conversation while waiting to wash my hands in the bathroom.
2. But Don’t Be Creepy
Cheesemakers are the rock stars of our world. Like teenager groupies, we extol their every effort behind our cheese counters. Saying something concrete about how you admire their work is awesome. “I really think your cheese has a complexity that people aren’t appreciating enough.” Asking questions is awesome, “So how many cows do you have anyway?” However, fawning is creepy. “OMG, you are my God. I came in my pants when I tasted your new triple cream.” is bad conversation starter, Goofus.
3. Respect Cultural Differences
While cheese gatherings tend to be even whiter than anarchist gatherings, there are definitely cultural differences between the rural and urban folks there. I live in a city and work in an environment where talking fast and loud is valued. ** Also, I’m a Northern Californian so oversharing is second nature. Many people at the conferences may see livestock a lot more than people. Slow it down (which is not the same as “dumbing it down”), be respectful, and meet halfway. Actually, meet them more than halfway. This is the primarily the cheesemakers’ conference, not yours.
4. Don’t try to Impress Anyone
I won’t name any names here, but those of us who have been going to ACS for awhile can all remember people who came on super strong asserting their cheese “knowledge” to everyone around them. Some people come in with only strong opinions and plenty of assumed privilege but without any sense of nuance. “XXXXXXX is the only blue cheese good enough for me to carry.” “All American Alpine-style cheeses but XXXXXX are crap.” Etc. Many of those folks are in other lines of work now. Just sayin’…
Official Events
1. Choosing Panels
I wouldn’t tell you which panels to go to, but I know that I always try to go to panels that are over my head. For example – while there are a lot of very good cheese science books out there now that non-scientists and cheesemakers can read — there were not when I first started going to ACS. I loved going to the panels that were just cheesemakers and dairy scientists arguing about things I was not near understanding. It helped (as much as possible) give me humility and made me realize how much I didn’t know about cheese. That’s a helpful reminder when most of us will know more than most of our customers after about a month of training.*** Remember to be respectful of the level of knowledge the panel assumes and who the panel is geared for. If the panel is discussing the specific flavor attributes and potential problems associated with secondary cultures in pasteurized cheese, for example, don’t ask, “What is cheese culture?” Keep your mouth shut. Soak up what you can. And do some research on your own when you get home.
Also, I differ from like 90% of you in that I decided long ago that I do not like the booze/cheese pairing workshops at ACS. It is just too big a crowd and moves to slowly for me so I never attend them even though they are always the hottest ticket. Don’t be afraid to find your own path. (Plus, getting completely drunk at the early afternoon Bourbon/Cheese pairings**** workshop at the 2001 ACS made me miss the tour of the Louisville Slugger Factory.)
2. Vote with your Feet
The ACS conference is expensive. Don’t waste your time. If a panel is bad, boring or just not geared to your needs, leave and go to another one. As a panelist, I hate this, but I understand it. Of course, I am not the kind of panelist who is using the ACS to give an informercial. If you feel like a panel is not about sharing information but merely self-promotion, you have my blessing to leave loudly in a huff.
3. Let Your Cheese Mind Wander
Staying in a panel that is not your thing has its advantages if you do not want to vote with your feet. Sometimes just one sentence or concept has sparked great ideas for improving our department. The reason we go to ACS is that it is a cheese-rich environment. Just going there and being around the cheese community can give you profound insight. When something comes to you, write it down. At one boring panel, I made a complete draft for a new kind of cheese signage for our coolers. I might never have done that bogged down in the day-to-day back home.
4. Take Notes.
I know you think you’ll remember everything, but you won’t. There is just too much. Plus, you get great tidbits like this that will make you laugh years down the line:
The French person on the panel talked about cheese sitting out on display and getting oily. One has to factor in the amount of lost weight and flavor in this situation and calculate pricing for (literal) shrink. He has a fairly heavy accent so after he bemoaned the loss my co-worker elbowed me and said, “Did he just say that cheese losing moisture is like a butterfly escaping?”
“No he said it was butterfat escaping”
“Oh, but that was so poetic.”
5. Volunteer
Some reading are already ready to mock me for this one since volunteering at ACS can be kind of a mixed bag. Let me mention first that a new management team is organizing the conferences so my previous experience is not indicative of future activity. I have had great times volunteering to plate for tastings and to cut for the Festival of Cheese***** Plus, at those things you get to meet the hard workers instead of the pretentious and flaky. If I don’t know anyone, give me some people to work on a big production project on and we will be friends for life in two hours. Just make sure you ask questions and know what you are getting yourself into. I am, frankly, still bitter about the time I was asked to deliver “a few” cases of beer to an event and it turned out to be 80 cases to two different venues, one of which didn’t have an elevator to get to the beer drop off spot. We missed lunch and the next panel!
Extra Curricular Activities
1. Visit Farms and Cheesemakers in the Area of the Conference
ACS is a busy time for the locals but it is also the time that they are expecting visitors, for the most part. Scheduling an extra day or two to the trip may seem like a hardship to your business, but it is invaluable to your ongoing cheese knowledge. For example, your regional cheesemakers may have different traditions, water use issues, equipment, philosophies, etc. than those in another region. As a Californian, when am I ever going to be in North Carolina again? Make use of the plane fare you’ve already spent. I don’t have to mention NEVER go to someone’s farm without asking first, do I?
2. Go to the Bar
This is the unofficial center of the conference. Everyone meets here on their way to dinner, everyone hangs out here after they come back. Some people actually never make it to dinner. You don’t need to drink alcohol, but this is the best chance to really get to know people and learn things about them that you probably shouldn’t talk about over the cheese counter. Do I have to say though, that no one likes a sloppy, bitter drunk? Take yourself away if you feel the need to start complaining about your boss or other people who are known in the small, small world of cheese. Oh and remember some people may actually be having business meetings here so ask if it’s ok to join people before you set up camp.
3. Dinner
This is a tricky one. Going out with folks to a nice meal is a great way to meet people. But, more than once, I have ended up going out with folks and spent way too much money. My co-op does not pay for my meals on these kinds of trips and when you find yourself picking a restaurant with folks who are on expense accounts, things can be awkward. Especially when people want to drink a lot of booze and then split the check evenly. When feeling particularly broke, I have definitely ordered an appetizer and then stopped by a liquor store later for a potato chip and Lil Debbie’s dinner. If you are at ACS on your own dime, just be aware than not everyone else is.
4. Taste
This is the most fun part of the conference. Taste everything offered to you. Taste it alone. Taste with pairings. Taste at official events. Taste at the bar. Taste warm cheese out of dirty backpacks. It’s all good. Take notes on this too, because there is no way you’ll remember the nuance of 200 different cheeses when you get home. BTW, one of my proudest professional moments is that I’m in the Cheese Nun documentary for about 5 seconds and I am taking notes at the Festival of Cheese, not mugging for the camera.
My Best Advice for the Conference
1. My best advice is really pretty simple. Enjoy being part of the cheese community. There are not a lot of us around so enjoying being around the thousand or so who are obsessed enough to travel around the country to seek it out. Sure, there is business being done and shady stuff in the corners, but soak in the pure beauty of cheese. It will keep you going throughout the year.
*The poignant lyrics of Dead Kennedys come to mind here. From “Well Paid Scientist”: Company cocktails-gotta go
Say the right thing
Don’t fidget, jockey for position
Be polite
In the pyramid you hate
Sip that scotch
Get that raise
This ain’t no party at all
** Recently a NY-based distributor complimented me on being the only person not in NY who he could talk full speed to. Heh.
***That shows how much more understanding about cheese the public is, btw. A decade ago I would have said a day of training would give a new cheese worker more info that most of our customers.
****Plus, I didn’t think any of the pairings actually worked.
*****Nearly two decades of cheese work means that my repetitive stress injuries prevent me from doing this anymore, but I would if I could.
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Tagged acs, acs 2012, american cheese society, american cheese society conference, cheese advice
I had a death-centric Sunday yesterday, that’s for sure.
First, we did the AIDS Walk out in Golden Gate Park. Our little 4-person team raised almost $3000, and, since there were about 20,000 people out there a lot of money was raised. Overall, more than $2,500,000 was raised yesterday and – even subtracting the pay of some overpaid CEO or ED – it’s a wonderful community event.
It’s funny, I haven’t been for a decade or so and it is a much more celebratory, rather than funereal, event these days in year 25. People had reminders of their dead – names written on their shirts, stuffed animals with name tags, the Quilt etc. – but the atmosphere was very much like a booze-free early morning party. It’s hard to feel sad when Cheer SF, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and the Stanford Marching Band is cheering you on.
We walked to the Ocean and caught a slow N bus (construction at Duboce and Church!) back home so I could make the memorial to Daphne Zepos at the Cheese School.
Daphne was a big deal in the cheese world. She was diagnosed three months ago with late stage cancer and passed away (at age 52) before many of us in the cheese world realized that things were that serious and that close. My facebook page and many personal conversations revolved around her death for the last week or so. We are a small community and you know it’s a big deal when one of us gets an NY Times Obit.
I held off from writing anything about her for a couple of reasons. The first is a common feeling… did I know her well enough to claim the space of mourning? That can often be a trap. Being a person who works in a very public place, and having lived within the same 8 block radius for nearly 25 years, many people who have passed through my life have died. It’s not usually my first realization, but I have come to learn over the years that even one nice memory is a gift to those left behind.
The other reason I hesitated was that so many others of you have written so eloquently about what Daphne meant to you. Emi, Anthea, Kirstin… and so many others. My relationship with Daphne was not as profound as the way she mentored many of you. I wanted to leave space for your words.
Daphne and I started working in cheese at around the same time so we had a different relationship. In fact, some reading may remember that we actually had a difficult relationship at the beginning. I won’t go into that except to say that cheese was too important for both of us to not forge a working relationship and a friendship. Over the years I realized that she was an extremely generous person, someone it was a pleasure to be around, someone I always looked forward to seeing at cheese events. Someone who was an extremely important person in our little world.
If you can’t deal with strong, opinionated women, the specialty cheese world is not the place for you. Daphne was always a force to be reckoned with. Sometimes a disorganized force who couldn’t quite seem to arrive on time, but always a force. Some of you who didn’t know her might think that sounds disrespectful, but it was part of her charm. There was always so much to do and so much great cheese. Even though she died at 52, no one can say she didn’t make the most of her time here on the planet. Most profoundly, she respected back and forth and honest discussion in a way that many people can’t handle. While I will agree with her completely on her L’amuse Gouda being the best anywhere, and I rank her Essex St. Comte as right up their with the best, she took it in stride when I told her I preferred my Parmigiano Reggiano to the one she imported. I mean, we argued about it — and I think we both had fun while we staked out our positions — but she understood my opinion.
She never took that kind of thing personally. I think she loved the fact that there was a community in the USA where she could have those kinds of debates. Her tireless work played a part in the fact that that community exists and thrives today.
I actually haven’t come to grips with the fact that she won’t be at the next ACS conference, at the next important cheese tasting, at the Cheese School the next time I am there… I think her loss will be felt even more when I arrive in one of those spaces and she never shows up. I’ll miss the way I wouldn’t see her coming and then suddenly she would appear next to me behind the cheese counter. We don’t allow many people to do that but we would never have thought of saying no to her, (not that she ever asked.) 😉
Goodbye Daphne. You will be missed tremendously. You touched the lives of many, many people. What more could someone really ask for than that?
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged cheese, comte, daphne zepos, gouda, obituaries, parmigiano reggiano, san francisco cheese school
Just had a great conference call about the panel I am doing at ACS this year and now I’m excited. While the panel could have a more exciting name — “HANDLING CHEESE IN A RETAIL ENVIRONMENT” is not a must-attend sound bite and it sounds like I’ll be in the middle of the retail floor massaging a Gouda or something — I think that it will be fun for us and the attendees. Plus, I get to display some of my Bad Cheese photo gallery during the presentation and that’s always fun.
Only five weeks away!
I’ve always thought this cheese was underrated and super cute. It’s in that Alpine cheese category that I love so much, but it’s less well known than many others from that region, at least here in the U.S. Though it varies by producer, affineur, etc. it can be about the spiciest of the French Alp cheeses with that aged sweet onion taste I associate more with cheeses from the Swiss side of the border.
Look at these beauties: 
Supposedly the history of this dates back to the 14th Century when Monks made this style of cheese. But you don’t need to study up on this cheese to enjoy it. I’m sure this is not true 100% of the time,* but, generally, darker the wash on the outside, the stronger the cheese. This actually holds true with the Vermont versions of this cheese – Tarentaise by Thistle Hill and Spring Brook – and there is a scientific basis for this so I’ll stay with it until proven otherwise.
Right now we have about the strongest Abondance that we’ve ever had but I like it in all its permutations. The blonder rinded ones are incredibly nutty and grassy, the dark pink sticky ones are big, intense, and powerful. And cute.
Did I mention cute? Look at these indented rinds with the little lips:
As Mojo Nixon would say, That’s “not no fool Billy Idol lip either”**
*We’ve never regularly sold this cheese so I do not consider myself an expert on it. In 19 years of mongering we’ve probably sold less than 2000 lbs.
**
We all love Parmigiano Reggiano, but can I gently say that it’s kind of distasteful for all the cheese folks to mourn the tragedy of the loss of all those Parmesans and not mention that people died in the Italian earthquake. Just saying….
Our thoughts in San Francisco are with those folks who suffered loss in this disaster. We’ll worry about Reggiano prices later.
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It seems like Mass media has finally figured out that “artisan” is an unregulated, practically meaningless term. I guess Jack in the Box, Dominos, and Tostitos have a way of really taking the romance out of a word.
Time magazine, sensing that people are actually reading about food these days, has had two short pieces on “artisan” in the last 6 months: “Wanna Help Sell a Food Product? Toss in the Word ‘Artisan’” and
The “Artisan” Hoax: Has That Word Become Meaningless?
See also 2 minutes in to this video on the Daily Show
(Hmmm, the embed is not working for some reason. Here’s a link)
I consider myself an original hater of the word “artisan.” Though I will admit to using it occasionally – usually to appease a customer who is fixated on the term – it has always rubbed me the wrong way. Yes, even when I was a board member for the California Artisan Cheese Guild it annoyed me. One of the reviews of Cheesemonger that I was most proud of cited my “picking apart” of the term “artisan” as “delicious”. I won’t repeat what I’ve already written about both the flaws of using unregulated terms and the irony of hearkening back to pre-industrial times as the good old days, but – as with anything in our economic system – words like this will always be co-opted as soon as Big Food starts losing market share.
In the natural foods world, many small companies became hugely successful creating products in opposition to the processed foods that dominate U.S. supermarkets. Now, of course, many of those companies are owned by the huge corporations* that also make that processed food. Also, increasingly the “artisan” American cheese companies that helped bring us the cheese revolution of the last twenty years are being bought by larger European companies.**
Which doesn’t mean that things are hopeless for people wanting to make hand-crafted, high quality cheese. “Artisan” is just a word and an obfuscating one at best. I’ve always thought that in many ways the microbrew, craft beer model is more applicable to cheese*** than the wine business model, and Big Beer tried to do all sorts of fake micro-brews but the small beer business is solid.****. Once people taste handcrafted, well-made, well-aged cheese, they are hard to fool with imposters.
Really, in the end, the taste speaks for itself. We don’t need words like “artisan” when we have actual quality.
*2009 chart here:
**I think this is preferable to those companies closing up shop, for the record. But, can you say a product is local if its owned by the French? For that matter, are you buying local if you shop at a chain grocery store owned in another state? I say the answer to both these questions is “no”.
***It is a shame that for obvious reasons cheese cannot — like small brewers –adopt “craft” as a term to describe itself.
****Timely article alert! I saw this after I wrote this post.
This is going to sound silly, I know. But I did my first PowerPoint presentation the other week. I was shocked how easy it was.*
I’m not here to do a commercial. My workplace isn’t very tech savvy. Most workers never touch a computer. Anyone can get it, but pretty much only buyers, office workers, and people elected to committees have store email accounts. As a whole, our co-op prioritizes hands-on work and does not really spend money on fancy tech** because we don’t really need it. For most work in the store, things done on computers are an abstraction or distraction. Other people can set the trends on grocery tech. We’ll come by a few years later and pick up what works well.
This is, of course, anathema to many of you reading this and to many people in our community who work in tech. We get asked sometimes – from a variety of sources: customers, students studying co-ops, people who seemingly have a lot of time on their hands to ponder – whether we have things like a complete constantly updated database of in stock products and their distributors.
No, we don’t.
Because it wouldn’t be useful at all and would cost a ton of money to implement and run and it still wouldn’t be as accurate manually checking the shelf if someone calls in to ask whether we have any Estero Gold in stock.
I’m certainly not anti-tech. Do I even need to defend that statement? But –increasingly unusual in this town — we are a business that relies on physical labor. Heck, we could be one of the few places outside of restaurants where tech workers actually interact with people like us. Grocery stores are also places that get by on low margin and high volume. Spending money on things that may turn out to be bug-filled or just a flavor of the month can actually make a difference in our yearly take home pay.
But my point is, at least a decade after it started making its appearance at conferences I attend, I am ready to adopt PowerPoint. Thanks for working out the kinks everyone!
Where I used it for the first time was the annual UC Berkeley Women’s Faculty Club Open House, an event that has been food themed for years. I talked to them about “Cheese in the Food Revolution” a topic I was given by Professor Sally Fairfax, an awesome educator who has written about the fight to save dairy farmland in the North Bay and who has a super exciting new book coming out which I will hype when the time is right.
I tortured the audience for awhile because logistically I had to do my talk before we had a cheese tasting but it was a fun event. Only one person walked out, but I think she had to go pick up her kids.
By the way, I took this photo because every night before I do a big event, this is what I see in my dreams when I get up to speak. Really, at the time this was taken, the attendees were enjoying wine tasting and snacks in the other room.
*I am also, of course, at the age where the person doing the tech at the event was less than half my age and was assuring me that everything would be ok.
**Our register system and point of sale software is fancy and costly enough!
I love Comte. Why not re-start my Purely Arbitrary Cheese Obsession of the Week entries with a cheese I love so much?
There are lots of good Comtes. We almost always use a 4-6 month Comte as our basic Alpine cheese and we often have a more aged one as well. Right now our 15 month (from the Fort Des Rousses which you can see lots pictures of if you scroll down to “Day 6”) is stellar. Nutty, grassy, milky-sweet…. I rarely use anything else for cooking anymore.
The basic difference between Comte (sometimes called Gruyere de Comte)and Swiss Gruyere besides the border line is that (at least from what I saw) the Swiss is brined and the Comte is hand-salted. From our vantage point 10,000 miles or so away from both producers, the Swiss is usually more pungent and onion-y, the Comte more nutty and sweet.
The other difference is that – due to the name-control regulations – Comte preserves the land where it is made by legally recognizing the importance of pasture. Though the milk of over 100,000 cows is used to make Comte, the average herd size is only 35 and each cow must have almost 2.5 acres for grazing. The local cooperatives that make the cheese are also limited in the amount they can produce.
I even used it as a submission for an article that an environmental organization was going to do on eco-friendly cheese. I thought it was perfect because it’s the best example I can think of to show how a cheese can be mass produced (at any given time there are about 50,000 wheels of Comte aging in Fort Des Rousses, which is a large, but not the only, aging cave for the cheese) but still be hand-made with the same quality of a small-production cheese and with explicit regulations regarding the protection of the environment and animal welfare. Amusingly, it wasn’t used because they chose to use a more esoteric, pricey,harder-to-find Alpine cheese example instead. Stay (upper-)classy, big environmental groups!
Anyways, Comte is my Purely Arbitrary Cheese Obsession of the Week. I’m going to go eat some right now.
(And hey, don’t forget to “like” my new facebook page before the “Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge” one gets phased out.)
Gordon ("Zola") Edgar 